I should qualify that most sane leftists will admit to the double standard and hope that is the case but one never knows with the left. Some on the left are pure ideologues and will ignore the truth as they always want to be right. Others are just too stupid to know that they are being manipulated. Some here could not care less that too many executive level DOJ and FBI are corrupt and attacking Trump just because of their blind hatred. There is no reasoning with them. Commentary courtesy of Trial of the Century blog. http://www.trialofthecentury.net/
Monday, December 17: Now You Know
Before you forget again of course: “Newly released United States government records summarizing investigations of the deaths of 18 migrants in the custody of US immigration authorities support a conclusion that subpar care contributed to at least seven of the deaths,” the Human Rights Watch recently declared. Well, “recent” is a relative term: This news broke about two and a half years ago, in the waning days of the Obama administration. But you probably didn’t hear about it then. Actually the deaths themselves happened between 2012-2015; it took around one to four years for anything to come to light. What a surprise! Maybe the media were too busy reporting on the Obama administration’s cage-like child detention centers? Oh, wait, they didn’t report on those, either.
Those terrible days of strategic media silence are over; caring about dying illegal immigrants is cool again. A lot of media attention was given over the weekend to the death of Jakelin Maquin, a 7-year-old who died in New Mexico while in the custody of the Border Patrol. Jakelin had been brought to the United States illegally by her father, who also arrived here illegally. There is a narrative going around that Border Patrol is essentially responsible for the girl’s death, but there is also some evidence that this is not the case, and that the girl’s father had “no complaints about how Border Patrol agents treated him and his daughter.” Well, maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not; surely an investigation, which should happen, will reveal more.
But that’s the point: You don’t generally have investigations into this sort of thing unless enough people are clamoring for it. And generally people don’t clamor for it unless they know about it. Most of our major media institutions have over the past two years devoted themselves wholesale to the coverage of illegal immigration and border policy, which is why you’re reading about a little immigrant girl whose death under the Obama administration probably wouldn’t have merited even a squib. The priorities have changed. They will surely change again once a Democrat takes office.
We harp a lot about media bias around here, and we know—at times it can seem like the same tired old conservative grousing. But it’s real. It’s not a conspiracy theory, not a grand Illuminati scheme; it’s just people, men and women, professional hacks who have a job to report honestly and truthfully and who very often do not perform that job because they want their favorite politicians to succeed and their hated politicians to fail. Our media have become even more relentlessly dishonest under the Trump administration, regularly reporting wholesale industrial-scale lies and falsehoods in order to make the president look bad; it is hard to go one cycle without some kind of titanic media fail. In other cases they are doing good reporting—on little Jakelin Maquin’s death, for instance—but we are all aware that such reporting will vanish into thin air when the president has a “D” next to his name. That’s unfair—to you, of course, and also to little girls like Jakelin, who deserve more than to be a pawn in a pathetic political gambit.
Monday, December 17: Now You Know
Before you forget again of course: “Newly released United States government records summarizing investigations of the deaths of 18 migrants in the custody of US immigration authorities support a conclusion that subpar care contributed to at least seven of the deaths,” the Human Rights Watch recently declared. Well, “recent” is a relative term: This news broke about two and a half years ago, in the waning days of the Obama administration. But you probably didn’t hear about it then. Actually the deaths themselves happened between 2012-2015; it took around one to four years for anything to come to light. What a surprise! Maybe the media were too busy reporting on the Obama administration’s cage-like child detention centers? Oh, wait, they didn’t report on those, either.
Those terrible days of strategic media silence are over; caring about dying illegal immigrants is cool again. A lot of media attention was given over the weekend to the death of Jakelin Maquin, a 7-year-old who died in New Mexico while in the custody of the Border Patrol. Jakelin had been brought to the United States illegally by her father, who also arrived here illegally. There is a narrative going around that Border Patrol is essentially responsible for the girl’s death, but there is also some evidence that this is not the case, and that the girl’s father had “no complaints about how Border Patrol agents treated him and his daughter.” Well, maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not; surely an investigation, which should happen, will reveal more.
But that’s the point: You don’t generally have investigations into this sort of thing unless enough people are clamoring for it. And generally people don’t clamor for it unless they know about it. Most of our major media institutions have over the past two years devoted themselves wholesale to the coverage of illegal immigration and border policy, which is why you’re reading about a little immigrant girl whose death under the Obama administration probably wouldn’t have merited even a squib. The priorities have changed. They will surely change again once a Democrat takes office.
We harp a lot about media bias around here, and we know—at times it can seem like the same tired old conservative grousing. But it’s real. It’s not a conspiracy theory, not a grand Illuminati scheme; it’s just people, men and women, professional hacks who have a job to report honestly and truthfully and who very often do not perform that job because they want their favorite politicians to succeed and their hated politicians to fail. Our media have become even more relentlessly dishonest under the Trump administration, regularly reporting wholesale industrial-scale lies and falsehoods in order to make the president look bad; it is hard to go one cycle without some kind of titanic media fail. In other cases they are doing good reporting—on little Jakelin Maquin’s death, for instance—but we are all aware that such reporting will vanish into thin air when the president has a “D” next to his name. That’s unfair—to you, of course, and also to little girls like Jakelin, who deserve more than to be a pawn in a pathetic political gambit.
